This series is inspired by a controversy thread where someone posited the idea that besides THE MISSION and some Sergio Leone westerns Ennio Morricone hasn't written anything great. Rather than making my usual comment that most of Morricone's great scores are from Italy and trying to get Americans to listen to them is like getting them to see movies with subtitles, I decided to take another tact. Since I am at an age where I will only be able to make my case a finite number of times I decided to turn this into a series presenting each great score one at a time, sort of like recordman.

For those who feel I'm not getting to your Foreign language favorites fast enough please do your own posts the more the merrier. But I gotta go my gut and how I discovered and explored the world of Morricone. There were so many lounge scores I was at a loss but then I remembered this one. ANCHE SE VOLESSI, CHE FACCIO? or roughly "Even If I Wanted to Work, What Would I Do?" was a 1972 comedy in Italian and the first directing effort by production designer Flavio Mogherini. The centerpiece for this is "Lei Se Ne More" a semi-song floating on a gorgeous piece of orchestration. As ethereal as Morricone has ever gotten. I couldn't wait to present it to you. Here it is:

Incidentally this is one of two times (the other is SONNY AND JED) that Morricone got his friend Nicola Samale to conduct the score. Nicola is a reknown conductor and composer in Italy. His work consists of numerous classical pieces plus 5 operas. As you can see this score is too dear for me to skip over. There are a few more lovely themes here like "Tramonto", "Anghingo" and "Per La Strada" so no monothematic restrictions this time. There is even a wacky song "Ora A Te, Poi A Me" to fill out the album. The storyline involves 4 friends who resort to stealing archaeological treasures from Etruscan tombs and are chased about by insurance agents and the police. I don't know how the images match up with the music. But the music is heavenly. Just wish I had more to display.

Morricone you can always upload the music on youtube yourself. Just use Windows MovieMaker and use as a visual a picture of the front cover, which you can easily find via google images. Won't take long.

I'm sure there are others ways as well if you look around (zshare.net perhaps).

Never got around to checking this one out remember enjoying some of the tracks though on Movie Grooves what a great site that was I'm sure I must have bought well over a hundred cds after checking out the rich samples they had up.

Morricone you can always upload the music on youtube yourself. Just use Windows MovieMaker and use as a visual a picture of the front cover, which you can easily find via google images. Won't take long.

I'm sure there are others ways as well if you look around (zshare.net perhaps).

Peter

Thanks, plindboe! I'm learning some stuff in this process. But not very quickly. Youtube has Failed (invalid file format) me 3 times. I'll begin again tomorrow.

A personal favourite and great to hear it's been reissued. Anyone even remotely interested in the music of the Maestro and hasn't heard this one, should take the opportunity to get it. Wonderful stuff!